What actions have you taken this year to meet the target? How do these compare to the actions taken in the previous year?

Over the last year, the council has continued to actively recruit new apprentices into the organisation and has been more diverse with the types and levels of apprenticeships being offered. This includes encouraging higher level apprenticeships and standards.

We have also identified resource within our Workforce Development Team to encourage and support the use of apprenticeship training for our existing staff and to support higher and degree level apprenticeship training to help fill our skills gaps, including the Chartered Legal Executive and Social Worker standards.

We are also working on a strategy to help raise awareness within service areas who may not have considered apprenticeships or supported internships. Internal drop-in sessions have been held for managers and employees to provide information and guidance on how these may benefit teams and individuals.

In addition to the Schools Apprenticeship Panel, an apprenticeship task group has been created, comprising individuals from across the organisation. The group meets monthly to discuss any expressions of interest for apprenticeships for new and existing workforce, consider approaches to new initiatives and discuss changes to apprenticeship levy.

The group helped to highlight potential apprenticeship roles, which services are finding difficult to recruit into and looked at opportunities for current apprentices to move onto the next level.

We continue to work with our locally maintained schools, with a dedicated resource within our Skills Team. During the past year, we have facilitated CYC’s first cohort of higher level apprenticeship training for existing staff, using the new School Business Professional standard. What challenges have you faced this year in your efforts to meet the target? How do these compare to the challenges experienced in the previous year?

Over the past couple of years, there have been some issues with training providers including paperwork inefficiency, poor communication and disorganised assessors, which has discouraged managers from hiring apprentices. We are now working more closely with training providers and implementing a contract management process to reinforce quality. This ensures that any issues are addressed and resolved before it affects the manager and apprentice.

The council has an ageing workforce and engaging with this cohort around using apprenticeship training as a learning and development opportunity and changing their perception of apprenticeship training is an ongoing process.

There are still some areas within the organisation where we would like to consider apprenticeships but standards are not available or are still in the pipeline. As well as this, our in-house training provider had stopped delivering apprenticeships that were popular within our schools, including Supporting Teaching and Learning Level 2.

Although there has been a significant improvement of buy-in from managers, it continues to be a challenge to change their perception of apprenticeships and changing this is a continuing piece of work. The Corporate Management Team’s (CMT) commitment to apprenticeships and releasing an apprenticeship strategy will help by having a ‘top down’ approach.

Over the past year, work has also been focused on ensuring our processes and systems are robust regarding to compliance with funding rules. • *How are you planning to meet the target in future? What will you continue to do or do differently?*

The Council has been successful at signing up for the LGA apprenticeship accelerator programme. The support provided by the LGA will assist in developing our apprenticeship strategy, on gaining buy-in from middle managers and analysing our workforce data to understand where apprenticeships could be used.

To enable us to make effective use of the levy and increase our offer to current staff in respect of learning and development, our CMT has committed to focus on identifying and increasing apprenticeships for existing staff. This will be linked to the skills audit completed by HR that has identified skills gap within the current workforce and how the levy can be used to fund apprenticeships for existing staff to fill these gaps.

Following on from CMT’s commitment to increasing apprenticeships within the council, a proposal to create a dedicated apprenticeship team has been put forward for consideration. This would increase the resources to support the proposals that may come from the LGA accelerator programme and the increased commitment to working towards using apprenticeships to develop existing staff. The team would also be able to implement a process for monitoring and supporting the quality of the training and the apprentice’s progression.

We will continue to highlight apprenticeship training by continuing to work with partner agencies in the city, holding events internally and attending events externally to reach out to prospective apprentices.